Philosophy and the Event PDF
Preview Philosophy and the Event
Philosophy and the Event sophyand the Event Alain Badiou with Fabien Tarby Translated by Louise Burchill polity RM06397R4 First published in French as La philosophie et l'événement © Éditions Germina, 2010 This English edition © Polity Press, 2013 Polit y Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1 UR, UK Polit y Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA AIl rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5394-5 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5395-2 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in the USA by Edwards Brothers, Inc. 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For further information on Polity , visit our website: www.politybooks.com Contents Translator~s Preface page vii Acknowledgements xx Foreword XXI 1 Politics 1 2 Love 39 3 Art 66 4 Sciences 92 5 Philosophy 105 6 A Short Introduction to Alain Badiou's Philosophy by Fabien Tarby 131 Translator's Preface Framing Philosophical Transmission The interviews that make up this book include a moment of interlocutory self-referentiality in which Alain Badiou points out to Fabien Tarby that the project of transmit ting his philosophical ideas by the means of transcribed orally conducted interviews - which is to say by means other than systematic writing - conforms to the found ing principle of the entire Platonic edifice: namely, 'the architecture of a philosophical idea exists in itself', 1 such that this has a full autonomy from the textual apparatus that serves habitually as its means of trans mission. In difference, then, from works of drama or fiction, philosophy is a protocol of transmission pertain ing to something not constituted by the writing process itself. It's for this reason, Badiou insists, that philosophi cal writing - regardless of its effects of style or literary qualities - is always didactic writing: its rationale con sists in conveying the Idea and, consequently, in con vincing and changing intellectual subjectivities. Yet, it is also the real reason, Badiou adds, for Plato's judging l Cf. infra, pp. 88-9. Translator's Preface VIll writing to be secondary to speech. Speech's superiority is not - pace Derrida - premised upon a metaphysical privileging of a full presence that the voice would supposedly instantiate in an im-mediacy to soul, or consciousness, but follows from its being a more com prehensive, as weIl as a more complex, means of trans mission. Consisting in a 'relation of subjectivity to the Idea' that cannot be reduced to a form of knowledge alone, philosophy requires for its complete, and not exclusively intellectual or discursive, transmission a transference onto the person of the philosopher - in other words, an anlorous receptivity or, as Badiou puts it slightly differently elsewhere, 'the encounter with a master,2 - which is precisely what the scene of speech sets the frarne for: the corporeal presence of the philoso pher, the resonance of his or her voice are the essential 'props', so to speak, for the full staging of the Idea and, accordingly, the latter's orchestration of subjectivity. Certainly, there is still a value given to 'presence' within this philosophical scene yet, in view of the latter's func tioning as a veritable 'machine of subjectivization', this value is in no way simple, immediate or transparent: 'the body of the other [the philosopher] has to be there, his or her voice has to resound', 3 but these are both variables within a shifting set of relations that act to ensure the circulation, crafting and capture of affects and forces no less than elements of knowledge or thought. Whatever Badiou's insistence on the transference effects that accompany spoken discourse, however, his comparison of speech and writing airns, above aIl, at showing that the rationalist imperative of transmis sion transcends each and every mode it rnay take. 'The transmission of thought is indifferent to language' is a 2 Badiou, Alain, 'L'Aveu du philosophe', in Marianne Alphant (ed.), La Vocation philosophique, Paris: Bayard, 2004, p. 149. 3 Cf. infra, p. 54. Translator's Preface IX formulation, found elsewhere in his work,4 that makes the same point, all while more boldly situating ideas' autonomy in respect not simply to language's written or spoken forms but to its substantive individuations as such. No national language, such as English or French, would impress, in other words, a singularity on the concepts it conveys; with Badiou not hesitating in this wa y to resurrect something of the order of transcendent signifieds - again, as it were, pace Derrida. Yet, while his dismissal of any linguistic condition bearing upon the transmission of thought is undoubtedly directed prirnarily to 'sophistic' thinkers who would accredit language with 'carving out' everything that has been envisaged as 'being',s it comports no less emphatically a great number of consequences for those equally, if otherwise, concerned with language's crafting of con cepts: namely, translators. Pre-eminent arnongst these is that no term of a national language can legitirnately be considered 'untranslatable' - other than in the sense, at least, that, insofar as certain words or certain semantic constellations highlight particularly acute1y the differ ences between one language and another, their transla tion can never be considered as 'assured'.6 Entailing a diagnosis of contrasting linguistic and cultural realities at a given rnoment in tirne, the translation of such 'untranslatables' is not only never a 111atter of 'superim position' but an act invariably calling for constantly reiterated probation. One such word of the French language posed particu lar problems in translating these interviews into English. 4 Badiou, Alain, 'Français: De la langue française comme évidement', in Cassin, Barbara (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, Paris: Editions du Seuil/Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004, p. 466. 5 Cf. infra, p. 113. 6 See Cassin, Barbara, 'Présentation' in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, Paris: Editions du Seuil/Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004, pp. xvii-xviii. x Trans[ator's Preface The term involved - dispositif - is not, it must be stated from the start, one of Badiou's philosophical concepts. Unlike 'event', 'void', 'multiple' or 'truth', or again, say, 'forcing' or 'compatibility', dispositif plays no crucial, intrinsic role in the articulation of Badiou's system of thought and is, as such, neither defined nor in any sense 're-marked' by Badiou on the occasions he enlploys it. It would seern, simply, a word of the French language at his (thought's) disposaI. Yet, as any reader of contem porary French theory is weIl aware, dispositif is far from being 'just' a lexical item in Badiou's national language. It has the status of an important concept in the work of Michel Foucault from the mid 1970s on, and has given rise, on this basis, to texts by both Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben (amongst others) set on explicating its rneaning. Its emergence as a concept predates, none theless, Foucault's use, being seemingly first endowed with a precise theoretical sense in two seminal texts written on cinema by Jean-Louis Baudry in 1970 and 1975 respectively.7 Since the late 1970s, moreover, dis positif proliferates as both an analytical concept and a technical term in just about every theoretical or opera tional field in France one can think of: frolTI media and communications to psychoanalysis, traffic flow manage ment to the analysis of funeral rites, education to ... translation studies.8 In most of these cases - to cite from 7Baudry, Jean-Louis, [1970J 'IdeoIogicai Effects of the Basic Cine matographic Apparatus' and [1975] 'The Apparatus: Metapsycho Iogicai Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema', in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introduc tory Readings, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 206-23 & 355-65. While Baudry doesn't define the concept of dispositif in the first of these two articles, he does use the term there in the sense that he attributes to it as a key concept five years later. 8 See KessIer, Frank, 'Notes on dispositif (May 2006), http://www. Iet.uu.nll-Frank.Kessler/personallnotes on dispositif.PDF; and LadmiraI, Jean René 'Pour une philosophie de la traduction', Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, n° 1, 1989, pp. 5-22.
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